Surgery update, four weeks out

Milestones seem to be helpful in making this transit, so I wanted to pay some attention to how things were going from the surgery, which was four weeks ago this evening.  It's easy to have moved on in my mind to purely thoughts of chemo, but the actual muscle recovery from the first step of this process continues to march on throughout.

My normal mobility has been about 97% restored. Every day the arm comes up a bit easier, and goes back a bit further. I still have lots of muscle tightness, which feel like tight bands within my upper arm, especially in certain positions (holding my arm straight up on a wall standing perpendicular to it - whoah, nellie) but it gets a bit better each day in a way that makes me confident I'll regain full mobility in the not-too-distant future. The last few percent of the recovery to 100% are always the slowest, so maybe it will be 6 months, or a year, or even two. But it will happen.

Yoga has been a part of the healing journey, as many of you know I have nurtured a yoga practice these past seven or so years. Instead of hopping right back into the 105 degree room, I'm using this period to explore some other modalities, including yin yoga (with an 8-years-later nod to Eric D).  While the first two weeks I generally steered clear of anything weight bearing on the left side, the last two weeks I have slowly and very lightly pushed myself to increase mobility doing exercises that try to rebuild/relax the muscles that got rerouted in my surgery.

Rerouted, you ask?

I don't think I touched on this in previous posts, but along with my modified radical mastectomy, I opted for reconstruction, which was a process that was started during my surgery. After my general surgeon removed the cancerous area with margins and the lymphatic area along the axilla (under my arm), a plastic surgeon put in a tissue expander which will serve as a "place holder" to push my skin out gradually until I am finished with chemo and radiation and have surgery to put in a permanent fake boob.  Some of the pectoral muscles run over this expander, which is why things, in general, feel "rerouted".

For those who aren't squirmy, here's a good example of a woman who went through this journey.

The expander, which I call the "starter boob", has been a weird thing to get used to; there is clearly a foreign body in my chest!  First of all, it's a bit stiff and has discernible edges (as you can see with the woman in the pictures). There is also a port at the front where they slowly add saline solution, which looks a little lumpy cyborgy. But probably my biggest complaint about this thing is the weird, stiff "side boob" it has, which I am still not used to feeling in my armpit. I am told this is to expand the tissue at the side of the breast so you have some natural drape and reduce the "stuck-on" effect of many fake boobs, and also to keep the expander in place (the side boob portion also runs under some muscle).

 My expander is already sort of a flat, wide B cup, so I am opting for only one or two silicone adds from here. The shape is already there, it just lacks about 30% of projection in the front. Everyone says the "real" fake boob is a lot more soft and less funky feeling than the expander, though it will never feel the same for the very natural reason that it is not. And, since I have heard that no matter how good the surgeon is, getting the new and eternally perky boob to match the other side is hard, I will likely live with a bit of unevenness.  However, I can get the right side "remodeled" to match the left better, should that be something I start to care about.

I've said a few times during this journey that I'll have time for vanity later, right now I am really just concerned about my life. But the weird thing about the expander surgery is that it forces you to think about your druthers at a time when, assuming a full remission, you are poolside in a small bikini sipping a lemonade.  It's a funny thought right now to imagine putting in the order for a fake nipple - apparently an outpatient procedure. Part of me feels inauthentic to go through more surgery just to try to approximate reality (though I note that these reconstruction and make-it-match surgeries are covered by insurance, when a much-cheaper "cranial prosthesis" is not - boobs are that important in our culture!). Even when all this effort is made to make me "whole", there will always be a reminder that this was real, this happened.

I think having no boob at all would be sort of a shouted version of that, where having a little scar is sort of a whisper. I sort of wish I was bad-ass enough to be a shouter, but maybe I'll just forgo the nipple tattoo and end up with my scarred faux boob being sort of a regular-decibel voice announcement, in a thick east coast accent that says "suhvivah".